The Unbearable Lightness of Being By Milan Kundera

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
By Milan Kundera
First Published: 1984
ISBN: 0571135390
Publisher: Faber and Faber/1999
Pages: 305


This is my fourth book by Milan Kundera. The other three being 'Laughable Lovers', 'Identity' and 'Immortality'. I had read this book sometime back but got around writing a review only now. You can check out the review of Identity here.

‘The Unbearable Lightness of Being’ is mainly the story of a Prague physician, Tomas, who escapes with his wife Tereza, to Zurich after the Russian invasion in 1968. When his unfaithfulness compels her to leave him and return to Prague, he follows her, knowing there would be no other chance to escape Communism. Tomas loses his license to practice medicine because of an editorial he had published in an anti-Communist newspaper. He can only get a job of a window washer. Much to his amazement, he is happy for a while in a job where he does not have to think (‘it’s a terrific relief to realize you're free, free of all missions’).

Written in 1984, "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" is both a product of its era and a timeless work of art. It makes us wonder whether life is difficult because it is heavy, or the transitory nature of it makes us too light to make a mark..

This is not a novel with a well-etched plot. In fact, it ponders over certain philosophies. When living under oppressive rulers-is it better to shout and thereby hasten the end, or to keep silent and gain thereby a slower death? What is the nature of love? Have you ever read the philosophy of excrement or kitsch? History is the same, he says, as light as individual human life. There is no option of judgment of chances either in history or in life.

In the very first chapter, the author introduces the concept of opposites that exist in life, lightness and weight. Light individuals foster the idea that, since we live our lives only once, events are futile, and/or carry no major implication. They do not feel bitter about the weighty, as that too would be onerous and over-analytical. However, those who are weighted, find a sense of purpose in every action, life's transience does not matter. Nonetheless, even the weighty ones find their own being too pedantic, and need to get away.

These tensions serve as backdrop for Tomas's and Tereza's marriage. Paradoxically, this very conflict seems to bond them together, not with intimacy, but for needing both lightness and weight. Told from the point of view of four different characters (Tomas, his wife Tereza, his mistress and the mistress' other boyfriend), the story unfolds in a slow paced but very satisfying way. Their lives waver but each one of them tries to find happiness in their own way. Kundera wrestles with the ideas of misapprehension, indecision, and human weakness, through these characters

Though, the novel conveys the realities, which etches people’s lives, the reader at times is left in a suspended illogicality, unable to determine what is right, and what is wrong. However, a clever narration, told in an interesting manner dispels most of his misgivings.

Innocent Erendera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Title: Innocent Erendira
Author: Gabriel Garcia Marquez
ISBN: 0140157522
Publishers: Penguin Books/1996
Pages: 183
Genre: Short Stories

One author I always end up picking is Marquez. I cannot resist him. Innocent Erendira is a collection of short stories spanning 25 years. Marquez explores, love, death, betrayal, power and duty in the short stories. One or two stories are not easy to interpret in one reading. There are eleven short stories and a novella---The Incredible and Sad Tale of Innocent Erendira and Her Heartless Grandmother.

The novella is a very poignant rendering about Erendira, who is only fourteen when we first meet her and is punished by her grand mother in a very diabolical manner when she accidentally burns her grand mother’s house. The way Erendira has to repay is heart rending. She runs away numerous times only to be brought back..

“The Sea of Last Time” has lots of imagery with unusual smell of the ocean. “Death Constant Beyond Love” is a strange love story where a senator falls in love with a nineteen year old when he had only six months to live.

In “The Third Resignation”, the last sentence ‘….he is so resigned to dying that he might as well die of resignation’ sums up the state of mind of a person who has been in coma for a long time.

One cannot read Marquez at just about any time. One has to have that mindset. As his writings are multi-layered, his characters are multi-faceted; sometimes there are open ends to his endings. Most of his stories are based on real life. His stories contain strange emotions, underlying mysteries and of course mastery over words and the world. Marquez appears to be obsessed with death and in those stories that is highlighted very well.

I would not recommend Marquez for the faint hearted or the die-hard romantic.

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers by Yiyun Li

A Thousand Years of Good Prayers
By Yiyun Li
ISBN: 000719663-6
Publishers: Harper Perennial/2006
Pages: 203


I was kind of browsing and saw this book. The title attracted me even though I had not heard of Yiyun Li. Reading the back cover, I simply could not put it back. I bought it and finished all the ten short stories at one go.

A thousand years of good prayers portrays a discerning look at life in contemporary China and its recent past. Most of the stories take place in a rural and small town China labouring under economic change and the move to a more free-market economy. All the ten stories delves into the ruin of the Cultural Revolution on the modern Chinese. The writing is immaculate, vivid - yet at times deeply unsettling. The stories are filled with tales of family discord and relationships, of tragic relatives, divorced and suicidal parents, adopted children, gay sons, unfaithful spouses, jilted lovers, unborn babies, and loveless marriages.

'Extra' presents the dismal predicament of Granny Lin, an elderly widow without a pension, whose job as a maid at a boarding school outside Beijing leads to a strange friendship with one of her young charges. In the final scene, she is back on the street, jobless, her bag of clothing stolen, and holding nothing more than her life's small fortune in her lunch pail.

In ‘Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way’, a recluse, Mr. Pang, deplored by his work colleagues as being 'a dog son of the evil landlord class' ' still appears daily at a job where he is no longer paid, and spends his home life counting grains of rice on his chopsticks.

The fatherless boy of 'Immortality,' his face resembling Chairman Mao, so that he is chosen to be the dictator's imitator after Mao's death, falls from favour in due course. In the final scene, we are left with the image of a demented Mao look-alike who has castrated himself at his mother's tomb.

In the title story, Li, Mr. Shi comes to a Midwestern American town from China to visit his daughter. In a local park, he meets and makes friends with an elderly Iranian woman whom he calls Madam, even though neither speaks much English and they can hardly understand one another. "That we get to meet and talk to each other...must have taken a long time of good prayers to get us here," he explains an old proverb to her in Chinese. “It takes three thousand years of prayers to place your head side by side with your loved ones on the pillow. For father and daughter? A thousand years, maybe.” One profound statement.

Most of Li's stories are usual narratives, but one, ‘Persimmons,’ is out of that mould. Told almost entirely through dialogue, a group of villagers slowly tell the tale of a young boy's drowning and his father's ineffective efforts to obtain justice that result in mass murder. The truth unfolds slowly, but the villagers' attitudes are resigned, as if no other outcome had ever been possible.

In ‘Love in the Marketplace’ a schoolteacher obsessed with the film Casablanca, is the victim of a broken promise. A stranger who arrives in the market place offers to slash his arm with a knife for money is the only person who understands her deep anguish and is ready to honour his word.

’The Prince of Nebraska’ is the story of an intricate love triangle. Sasha is pregnant and on her way to an abortion clinic in Chicago seeks Boshen's help. Both of them are involved with the inscrutable Yang, an out of favour Chinese Opera singer. An unusual arrangement is worked out between them for a love that does not fit neatly into the box of a conventional relationship.

For this book, Yiyun Li was presented with the first ever Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, now the world's richest short story prize. It has also won "The Guardian First Book Award."

Fury by Salman Rushdie

Title: Fury
Author: Salman Rushdie
ISBN: 0099443384
Publishers: Vintage/2002
Pages: 259






I received this book as a gift from my nephew as a birthday gift. I have read "The Satanic Verses" which is banned in India long time back and planning to read Midnight's Children next.

"Mysteries drive us all," Salman Rushdie writes in his new novel, Fury. "We only glimpse their veiled faces, but their power pushes us onward, toward darkness. “All of us--college professors, Wall Street investors, and cab drivers--live in a dark, Freudian world, and we are each of us,” Rushdie argues, “struggling desperately to deny our own furious animal selves.”

Malik Solanka, the fifty-five-year-old former Cambridge professor and implausibly successful doll maker at the centre of Fury, recognizes the dangers of slipping into the dark, destructive side of fury. As his wife and small son lay asleep in their London home, he had stood over her with a knife "for a terrible, dumb minute" feeling, as Rushdie puts it, "murder on the brain." The incident…which Solanka's wife stays ignorant--is alarming enough to drive Solanka out of the family, and he escapes to New York.

Fury opens with Solanka living alone in a Manhattan apartment, and he roams the streets, raging silently over the glitziness and falsehoods, present-day society offers up as a reason to work, a reason to deny the truth. Solanka has come to America to 'erase' his earlier self and the computer metaphor implied in the erasure image are central to Rushdie's anti-digital themes. The computer age is corrupted, and its code needs to be 'de-bugged,' just as Solanka's self-code must be. "If he could cleanse the whole machine," Rushdie tells us, "then maybe the bug, too, would end up in the trash."

After he drinks himself into a succession of fainting fits and gets up to read that a man similar to him has murdered yet another New York City woman, Solanka asks,” has Solanka's fury reached a new level of destructiveness? Solanka has to carry more than what his somewhat unexciting character can handle. He is too passive and it weakens the novel's sequence of events largely. At one point, Rushdie writes, "This about New York Solanka liked a lot--this sense of being crowded out by other people's stories, of walking like a phantom through a city that was in the middle of a story which didn't need him as a character."

Fury is not a fast-paced thriller. In fact, Fury is a bit slow. Too much of the action offered in the first half of the novel takes place in the past and the narrative in the present is too often a matter of Solanka's inert if angry observations about present-day society.

Rushdie's creative energies are largely focussed into pun-driven ranting. Admittedly, some of it is remarkable in its regularity and range. Rushdie books are not something one can ignore after starting them.

PS: Rushdie had dedicated this book to his then girlfriend, Padma Lakshmi, now his enstranged wife. The Muslim world is furious about him being knighted.

Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson

Notes from a Small Island
Author: Bill Bryson
ISBN: 0552996609
Publisher: Black Swan
Pages: 352


This is an account of a journey that Bryson makes round Great Britain some time in the early 90's after deciding that he will leave UK and go back to the United States. Before he leaves, he feels the need to see the country, which he has called home for the past two decades. He starts with a recollection of his first arrival in Dover good 20 years before and then repeats the Calais-Dover journey and continues the tour (mostly by public transport) that takes in - amongst others - London's Wapping; Dorset Coastal Path, Salisbury, Lincoln, Bradford, Port Sunlight, Inverness and Wick.

He begins his journey, entering by sea from France as he first arrived, on the south coast of England and aims to travel all around in just a few weeks. This time limit seems like so little once he actually begins. Everything is of interest to him and he cannot quite find the time to fit it all.

It is full of rich conversations, humorous sketches and amusing exchanges with the natives who often astonish him with their observations and attitudes. A good-natured work of art through the country's eccentricities as well as its charms, this is an affable companion for any trip to the isle.

This book is not just a catalogue of Bryson jokes, there are idiosyncratic description and some chapters are gems of light travel writing. He seems particularly better at describing cities and town than countrysides.

Overall, 'Notes from the Small Island' presents an informative, personal and mostly warm portrait of this island and its inhabitants.

Reading this, one should not expect beautiful prose or deep insights. However, it makes us laugh over and over again.

Defy the Eagle by Lynn Bartlett

Title: Defy the Eagle
Author: Lynn Bartlett
ISBN: 0373288077
Publisher: Worldwide Romance
First Published: July1986
Pages: 635

Rome/Celtic Historical Romance

Enemies by birth. Lovers by destiny. Jilana had come to Caddaric in a dream, with a whisper of ethereal beauty that vanished when he awoke. Even as the bold warrior battled to save his beloved land from the Roman invaders, he looked for the woman who haunted his every waking moment. Until the morning, he finally saw his violet-eyed angel -- and recognized that his torment had just begun. For Jilana was one of the hated enemies Caddaric had vowed to destroy.
This book is multi layered, with many different locations and situations, which the two main characters go through. One does identify with both of them, see things from both their sides and indeed understand why they are both so intractable.

This is the story of Jilana, a young Roman woman who lives an unremarkable life with her family in Venta Icenorum, until she meets a young Centurion -Caddaric, whilst riding in the woods near her home. The Centurion is in reality an Iceni warrior who is scouting for his Queen - Boadicea and Jilana is swept up in events well documented by history.

Jilana intervenes in the public flogging of the Iceni Ruler and brings herself to the attention of early Briton's Governor as well as the Iceni community. As the uprising begins, whilst Jilana's life is spared due to the mercy she showed Boadicea, she is enslaved and given to Caddaric as a reward for his part in taking the City. Her family murdered, Jilana tries to find a way to survive, adapt and resist her growing attraction to her hated "enemy" Caddaric.

This is a long novel but nowhere is it boring. Jilana is a strong and likeable girl who is present at all the historical milestones of this uprising right up the final defeat of the Iceni and one can feel all the emotions along with some surprising twists.

One reasons I loved this book is because of its setting - the Roman Empire. The romance in this book is awesome, poignant and very beautiful.

The Bafut Beagles by Gerald Durrell

• Book Title: The Bafut Beagles
• Author: Durrell, Gerald
• ISBN: 0140012664
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Year Published: 1971

This book chronicles Gerald Durrell's animal collecting expedition to the British Cameroon, in the late 1940's. It has interesting characters, human and animal. The portrait of the chief of Bafut is a stunning character study, and the country and the people are described with fondness. Durrell writes dancing monkeys, a midnight frog hunt, the night he taught the chief to dance the Conga, his group of hunters and their assorted pack of hunting dogs (the beagles), and the joys and inconvenience of keeping a large collection of wild animals.

This book was first published in 1954 but the actual collecting trip must have been in the late 40s. The Africa presented here is an anthropological journal. Durrell is respectful of the Africans and their culture, but this does not prevent him from sitting down and getting repeatedly sloshed with the local king. Durrell never refers to the people of Bafut as savages but the 'Bafut beagles' of the title refers to both the mongrel dogs that help him to collect animals and the Bafut hunters. He recounts that the hunters are superstitious, but he never stereotypes them. He communicates with the people of Bafut in pidgin English.

Durrell's fondness for Africa, its people and the animals pervades this narrative. He presents himself in a classic combination of self-deprecating humor, oddity, earthiness, but finally practicality and competence.

A native ruler known as the Fon, whom the D.O. said Durrell must be sure to get on his side if he hoped to succeed, ruled this grassland kingdom. The best way to do that was to prove he could carry his liquor!

As always, his love of "all creatures great and small" shows through even during such catastrophe as when he is bitten by what he thinks was a harmless blind snake, but he tells his cook, "'e get eye," a thing no member of the supposed species ever possessed. The best scenes are those in where the Fon appears roguish, irrepressible, and an indiscriminate lover of drink in every kind and combination, but he still proves to be the best collaborator, an animal collector could hope for--and a lover of the outdoors as well. Clad only in a loincloth and armed with a spear, he takes Durrell to see the evening manifestation of a colony of galagos, tiny arboreal creatures locally known as shillings.

All Durrell's books are great fun, but this is one of the best. This is one book I keep reading over and over again.

Country poem meme

I had gone to poefrica/rethabile to comment on his works. I landed up on this Country poem meme.

I thought why not give it a try! I did learn something about a country I know nothing! I even plan to find out more about its literature.

Intro for you all:

Take a country whose name begins with the last letter of your surname. (a) Jane Doe would take Ecuador, for example, or Egypt. England (like the USA and Ireland) does not qualify. Wole Soyinka would take Angola, or Afghanistan. If you cannot find a country with that letter (and only then), move back a step. (b) Jane Doe would take Oman, in that case. And as for Wole Soyinka, he would go for Kazakhstan, or Korea. And so on.

Thank you. Please tag two people (leave a message on their blog, too).

Here is my offering:

As my surname is Tripathy, Yemen was the only country that came to my mind.

1. Tell us what the capital city of the country

Yemen is a Middle Eastern country located on the Arabian Peninsula in Southwest Asia. Yemen is bordered by Saudi Arabia to the North, the Red Sea to the West, the Arabian Sea. In addition, Gulf of Aden to the South, and Oman to the east. Yemen's territory includes over 200 islands, the largest of which is Socotra, about 415 kilometres to the south of Yemen, off the coast of Somalia. The capital of Yemen is Sana’a.

2. How many inhabitants that country has?

It has a population of about 20 million people

3. Find and share with us a poem in English of not more than 20 lines from that country. If it's longer; cut it to twenty lines or less.

Waddah al-Yaman, born Abdul Rahman bin Isma’il al-Khawlani(d. 708), was an Arab poet. He was born in Yemen in the second half of the seventh century. He was famous for his erotic and romantic poems. He was executed by the Ummayad Caliph Al-Walid I, allegedly due to his over familiarity with the former's wife. Waddah is now regarded as the national poet of Yemen.

One of his poems goes like this:

She said, "Don’t come to our home, my father is deadly jealous."
I said, "I’ll pluck you before he knows it, my sword is razor sharp."
She said, "There’s a whole castle between us."
I said, "I’ll fly my flag over the castle."
She said, "There’s a whole sea between us."
I said, "I’m a strong swimmer."
She said, "My seven brothers keep an eye on me."
I said, "I’m a match for them all."
She said, "Allah is watching us."
I said, "My lord is Merciful and Forgiving."
She said, "I have run out of words, so come tonight when everyone’s floating in dreams, and fall on me like dew, undisturbed."

4. Tell us something you particularly like about the poem you have chosen:

There was no other choice. It is the only poem I could find on the net from Yemen.

5. Add a line anywhere in the poem (beginning, middle or end), and clearly show which line is yours to avoid confusion and/or ambiguity.

I said, "Tonight I come to you and merge our souls."
She said, "Don’t come to our home, my father is deadly jealous."
I said, "I’ll pluck you before he knows it, my sword is razor sharp."
She said, "There’s a whole castle between us."
I said, "I’ll fly my flag over the castle."
She said, "There’s a whole sea between us."
I said, "I’m a strong swimmer."
She said, "My seven brothers keep an eye on me."
I said, "I’m a match for them all."
She said: "Allah is watching us."
I said, "My lord is Merciful and Forgiving."
She said, "I have run out of words, so come tonight when everyone’s floating in dreams, and fall on me like dew, undisturbed."

I tag J. Andrew Lochart, Borut and/or anyone else who wants to play.

Deadly Kisses By Brenda Joyce

Deadly Kisses By Brenda Joyce

ISBN: 0778322688

Pages: 464

Historical

Publisher: MIRA
Time Period: New York, 1902

I picked this book to read while traveling. I rarely read romances but I wanted something light. This is not a romance in the strict sense. I did enjoy it.

It begins with Francesca being summoned to the home of her fiancé Calder Hart's, ex-mistress. She finds Daisy's best friend, Rose, rocking Daisy's bloody corpse. Francesca is hired by Rose to find out who killed her one time friend and rival. Once she learns that Calder lied to her, Francesca begins to fear that he is involved in the death, at the least, and perhaps something more sordid. Still, she is unable to shake her instinctive sense that Calder is lying about something. The police are far less inclined to believe in his innocence, and yet she believes in Calder and is determined to set him free even after his own brother arrests him for Daisy's murder. As her investigation continues, Francesca learns many ugly things in the victim's life. Everyone tells her, it is better to stop her quest but Francesca needs to know the truth.

Calder attempts to distance himself from her until he realizes that no matter what he has or has not done, and no matter what is said of him, Francesca will loyally stand by even as things deteriorate. Only she can see the goodness and vulnerability in this former rogue.

....................................................

One down from Summer Reading Challenge..

The City of Falling Angels by John Berendt

The City of Falling Angels
by John Berendt
412 pages
ISBN 9780143036937
Penguin



The City of Falling Angels opens on the evening of January 29, 1996 with Berendt traversing in a water taxi to his hotel three days after a when a powerful fire destroys the historic Fenice opera house. Berendt chooses to extend his stay to learn more about the fire and the city from the most fascinating source, not necessarily consistent—the Venetians themselves.

It is a great work of journalism, storytelling, and societal insight. It is a spellbinding look at an otherwise unreachable community of people, who inhabit one of the world's most beautiful cities, a city instilled in art, history, tradition, and ritual. It is a portrait of the captivating and colorful Venice—the world that exists in the off-season, when the tourists have departed and Venetians have Venice all to themselves.

Dragging on all his talents as an investigative reporter, Berendt goes behind the pretense of decaying buildings to reveal the city's intricate, hidden private life. Complex by nature, the Venetians reveal themselves in both open and secretive ways—as Count Marcello tells him, "Venetians never tell the truth. We mean precisely the opposite of what we say."

Berendt gets to meet people whose families lived through a thousand years of Venetian history. He speaks with a variety of people who make their homes in grand palaces and in tiny cottages. In the course of his investigations, Berendt introduces us to a rich cast of characters: a prominent Venetian poet whose shocking "suicide" prompts his sceptical friends to pursue a murder suspect on their own; the first family of American emigrant that loses possession of the family palace after four generations of ownership; an organization of high-society, party going Americans who raise money to preserve the art and architecture of Venice, a contemporary Venetian surrealist painter and shocking provocateur; the master glassblower of Venice; and many more, stool pigeons, scapegoats, hustlers, sleepwalkers, the Plant Man, the Rat Man, and Henry James.

Berendt spins a suspenseful tale out of the threads of many stories—some directly connected to the fire, others not. He finds chaos, corruption, and crime are as characteristic of Venice as its winding canals. With a compelling combination of inquisitiveness and composure, Berendt presents an intimate look at a community of natives and expatriates as multifaceted as the colors reflected in the Fenice fire and in the artwork designed to commemorate it.

Berendt tells a tale full of atmosphere and surprise as the stories build, one after the other, ultimately coming together to reveal a world as finely drawn as a still-life painting. The fire and its aftermath serve as a leitmotif that runs throughout, adding the elements of chaos, corruption, and crime and contributing to the ever-mounting suspense of this brilliant book.

I enjoyed Berendt’s deep descriptions and adroit method for telling stories. In particular, he is good at telling both sides of striking events, often shaping his tale to make the reader alternate between one side and another. Berendt is a master of real-life characters and their stories.